"We have concluded that this arrangement is a bad idea," says a White House spokesman, who added that the administration is open to working out some new arrangement with photographers. David Bauer writes:

The practice of re-enactments has a long history. Washington veterans say President Harry Truman would deliver speeches over radio and then repeat them for newsreel cameras. Doug Mills, a photographer for The New York Times who was on duty May 1, said he has seen every president from Ronald Reagan to Obama take time after a speech so still photographers could get their shots.

White House photographers described last week how President Obama, after finishing his speech about Osama bin Laden's death, pretended to speak for the still cameras. Poynter's Al Tompkins noted that this practice "flies directly in the face of the National Press Photographers Association Code of Ethics."

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AUTHOR INFORMATION

From 1999 to 2011, Jim Romenesko maintained the Romenesko page for the Poynter Institute, a Florida-based non-profit school for journalists. Poynter hired him in August of 1999, after seeing his MediaGossip.com, a hobby site he started in May of 1999.